The exhibition, titled Scent of Invisible Footprints — in Moments of Complexity, at Museum Africa in Newtown, comprises about 180 sculptures in a variety of materials, including found objects, metal, wood, bone, stone, plastics and bronze. The title of the exhibition, the beret-clad artist says, is evocative of the way he lived as a refugee, how he left no traces; neither going, nor staying, existing in a void.
Pitika Ntuli says the sculptures, diverse in their range, production and complexity, show a “perverse and stubborn idea to impose his ego” on the materials he worked with. This includes dolomite, steel, bronze and wood from a 200-year-old mahogany tree.
Some of his works will be accompanied by unpublished poems he has written over the years and which he recites at the many functions at which he is invited to speak. Ntuli has a multidisciplinary approach to say the least.
In the 1970s Ntuli spent a year incarcerated in Swaziland’s cells before international pressure secured his release. When he came out he joined the bustling exile community in the United Kingdom, where he mingled with other immigrants, such as Zimbabwean poet and writer Dambudzo Marechera, Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o and others. It was in England that he spent the greater part of his more than three decades in exile.
The New York- and UK-educated sculptor and scholar returned to South Africa in the mid-1990s and joined the fine arts department at Wits University after teaching at Middlesex University. He is now a professor extraordinaire at Tshwane University of Technology.
He explains the genesis and meanings of his artworks as we stroll through the maze of an exhibition slowly taking shape as workmen finish up installations in the Newtown space.
In one corner you will see multiple faces carved on to ancient mahogany; other pieces are of anthropomorphic figures. “Each piece must tell us something about the past 200 years,” he says. His wooden sculptures mix secret-society mysticism, history and the contemporary while making wry commentary on the black condition. This one is Toussaint L’overature, he tells me, gesturing at an image of a big-nosed face. “You know they said the man had a nose that covered a third of his face,” Ntuli says before dissolving into good-natured laughter.
His bone sculptures occupy a separate space. “I am a sangoma and when I come here I throw these bones to divine the world,” he says, evoking the throwing of bones to the Earth in a divination process. The elongated, varnished figures, carved mostly from elephant bone, remain largely untouched, except for some etching or colourful studs used to impose a semblance of a human face.
Ntuli’s works show his facility with varied mediums — although a degree of dexterity and sheer doggedness is apparent, the figures send off minimal signals at long, irregular intervals.
“When elephants see one of their own they stop and form a circle and start mourning. That’s sensitivity; they are drawing our attention to our insensitive ways towards nature.
“If we are culling animals it means we are implying that we could do this to human beings as well. That’s what genocide is about,” he says, explaining his choice of medium.
His stone sculptures, some of them weather-beaten and crusted with clay, lack the finesse and the varnished look that Zimbabwean masters, such as Nicholas Mukomberanwa and others, made popular. Perhaps it’s because of the choice of stone. There’s little you can do to carve million-year-old dolomite; if you place it under more stress than it can withstand you are likely to break it.
Ntuli tells me that he has worked with some of the leading masters of stone, including the Takawira brothers, John and Bernard, Mukomberanwa and others. Back in the 1970s he was part of an initiative to make implements available to Zimbabwean sculptors.
It’s in his sculptures using railway sleepers, wheelbarrows and other found objects that Ntuli finds full postmodernist expression (as well as a cross-generational dialogue with early 20th-century Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, famed for his elongated sculptures).
The rust-eaten material (wheelbarrows, wheelbarrow frames and the like), which is more malleable, easily lends itself to decipherable metaphor.
This allows his imagination to fester indignantly, as his works evoke a heroic, if bloody, past, while making snide remarks about “tenderpreneurs”, the scourge of the post-colony.
The MTN-sponsored exhibition runs until August 31